Data Science for Business

What business leaders need to know about data and data analysis to drive their businesses forward.

DataScienceForBusinessCoverA couple of years ago, Claudia Perlich introduced me to Foster Provost, her PhD adviser. Foster showed me the book he was writing with Tom Fawcett, and using in his teaching at NYU.

Foster and Tom have a long history of applying data to practical business problems. Their book, which evolved into Data Science for Business, was different from all the other data science books I’ve seen. It wasn’t about tools: Hadoop and R are scarcely mentioned, if at all. It wasn’t about coding: business students don’t need to learn how to implement machine learning algorithms in Python. It is about business: specifically, it’s about the data analytic thinking that business people need to work with data effectively.

Data analytic thinking means knowing what questions to ask, how to ask those questions, and whether the answers you get make sense. Business leaders don’t (and shouldn’t) do the data analysis themselves. But in this data-driven age, it’s critically important for business leaders to understand how to work with the data scientists on their teams. In today’s business world, it’s essential to understand which algorithms are used for different applications, how statistics are used to create models of human and economic behavior, overfitting and its symptoms, and much more. You might not need to know how to implement a machine learning algorithm, but you do need to understand the ideas the data scientists on your team are using.

The goal of data science is putting data to work. That’s what Data Science for Business is all about, and the reason I’m excited to see us publishing it. There are many books about data science, and an increasing number of undergraduate and graduate programs in data science. But I haven’t seen anything that teaches data science for the leaders who will be using data to drive their businesses forward.

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